Putting The Blog Last

One Huge Jerry Springer Show

Updating this blog as the last thing of "the day" has not worked out too well, and has brought about the 11 day lapse in posts.

One problem with that is, it seems trivial to resume with a mundane post that would not be worth waiting 12 days for. Someone who posts only once a month might be successful if he were to put a month's worth of insight into the post, but a "not much happening today" type entry every 12 days, begs the question of: then what was so special about this particular day that not much happened, that made you want to blog about it?

There is actually a lot not going on -stuff that has piled up over the past week, which I spent working on a video that is 90% ready to appear here (and maybe on Facebook).

I had one stretch where I started working on it at around noon, right after watching Jeopardy -one of a few things that give me some sense of the order of time; the other one being Harold the cat's appetite- and worked on it until the sun went down and continued until the sun came up; then wound up working all the way through another night; eventually going to bed at my "regular" time; only one whole day late.

I learned a few things. One of which is that it is better to knock off from a project and catch some sleep, rather than to try to function on no sleep.

In the past, I might have posted up the video after determining that it was "not bad," partly just as a way to get out of having to work on it more.

But, the past couple weeks, watching the thing after having slept helped me see it with new eyes and I noticed things that could be improved, and then spent up to 48 straight hours working on it.

Then, last night, after having used the OpenShot Video editor for about 5 years, I searched for some kind of manual for the thing, and discovered that a tutorial had been there all along, hiding in the -go figure- help menu.

But, now the problem is I now know all the things I can do with OpenShot, and have gotten ideas that could take months to bring to fruition. I did learn that the biggest reason I had nicknamed the program "OpenCrash," is because I have a paltry 4 gigs of RAM on this laptop. 

12 is recommended. 

I am getting around that by working in stages; loading the project and then making minor changes before exporting it again, adding one bell and maybe a whistle each time, and then saving it. That way the memory doesn't have to store all the files for undoing things. Every change you make, the system saves the previous file, so it can snap back to it if you hit undo. And if the video is 1 gigabyte, like mine, this only leaves room for 4 changes, not 27 or so, like I had been trying to do. I wound up having to unplug the laptop and pull the battery out then reboot it every time it froze...

Would I like to put the video on Youtube tonight, or maybe spend at least another day putting a rolling credits type thing at the end of it, and maybe a title at the beginning? That would just require that I read a Wiki, or something, about "SVG" image format, and learn how to do the above.

Some might say: Just put all your work into the music portion, and just use a still shot photo -just throw anything up there.

But, in order for the video to tell a story (since the lyrics are ambiguous), this could be done using pictures.

So, today, Thursday, I plan on redoing a section of vocal where I don't like the vibrato on my voice, and exploring how easy it would be to add the credits and title.

The first will require me to double all the instruments on other tracks, starting with the drums. It is easy to see where they hit by the spikes in the waveform, and is actually an opportunity to use a different snare and bass drum for just that section, which might be a good contrast to the rest of the track.

Then I just sing over it, using the vibrato that I want and then paste it over the existing stuff. This is at least a 5 hour job, I know from experience. 

Meanwhile, I need to take a shower, put on clean stuff and go down to the Family Dental place right down the street which is on the list of participants in the Dentaquest plan that I am somehow enrolled in, through the agency of some forces working invisibly on my behalf. It might be because I am "on" medicaide. It smacks of the Biden administration and that entitlement program, where us citizens become like children getting an allowance from our fathers, as long as we behave. Behave "woked," that is.

I think I would give up all of my benefits, just to see a lot of other people likewise deprived. Maybe I should check that attitude...

I need to fix my eyeglasses, as one of the arms has broken off. This would just require picking up some glue at the Dollar store next to the dental place...

Right now, though, it is approaching 5 p.m. and the dental place will likely be closed by the time I get there, given that I need to take a shower after having gone 48 hours on a lot of coffee and then slept in the clothes I am wearing...

So, the dentist will have to wait one more day.

The eyeglasses might be doable, along with putting air in the bike tire, so I can end this 6 week period of walking everywhere. It is the same tire that went flat over the course of 2 days, but I wasn't able to see any bubbles after putting the tube underwater and squeezing it.

So yeah, not much happening today.

I have just now decided, though, to take up to an additional week to improve the video. Maybe after fixing that one section I will repeat the process and redo all the music. There is a voice over that I used the autoduck effect on to reduce the volume of the music when the guy speaks, which has to be done precisely so that it doesn't swell up in an unnatural way when the guy pauses. I'm not exactly pleased with the results I have gotten on that section, either. So, what, another 3 hour crash coarse on how to use the autoduck effect, and then back at it?

Probably.

It seems that I am at the stage of learning how much I don't know.

Youtube can, and probably should, take the video down for copyright infringement, because I am using clips off the Dance Moms website, and they are smart; they've got that pesky watermark prostituted all over it, in almost every frame.

They should take into account that I am not trying to make money off of their work. If that should happen, I could always have it hosted on gab, the free speech site, for which I would just have to pay a small fee for a "pro" account. It's amazing what you can get for just a little bit of money online -the huge gap between the free stuff and all you can get for just 5 bucks a month.

Hell, I could buy a domain through GoDaddy for something like 30 bucks a year, and then be able do stuff that I can't on Blogger.

I could do a lot of things, but instead I am sitting here, all sweaty and crossing things off the list of what I might accomplish today. The dentist is struck-through as of now.

That leaves glue for the glasses, air for the tire and litter and food for Harold.

I hope I don't just wind up drinking beer and yelling "ignorant n****r!" at videos of Don Lemon, or Maxine Waters all evening, and not getting anything else "done..."

The fact that the above could get this blog removed from the "worldwide web" regardless of the context it is being used in, is just wrong. And despite the asterisks, because cancel culture can fill those in for everyone, thank you...

It's been hard making new friends on gab and parler; they should really just divide facebook into left and right, with maybe a red or blue background, depending upon which community a user is in.

I might just be blogging soon on a platform that the likes of Alex in California could never find.

It's mind blowing to see these people talking about the problem of "misinformation" and its roll in instigating the horrible riot at the Capitol building, and how all these people that disseminate it need to be basically not allowed to post anywhere. Mind blowing because most of the subjects that they are on one side of are open to debate. Like, there are some of the world's most brilliant scientists who outright disagree over matters such as climate change, but half of them have been branded as misinformation mongers and are being targeted for cancellation.

The sad thing is that, our generation of "boomers" wouldn't go for any of that, but this latest generation of mass shooters of school children seems to be blithely dealing with the problem of how to exterminate all the people who voted for Trump, just because they have been deluded by someone or thing (an algorithm) more powerful than the ex-president. They just can't step outside themselves long enough to examine the thoughts in their heads, and how they got there, and if they are helping them or anyone else.

It's ironic that the fallout from having a reality show star as president is that the whole world is on the verge of turning into one huge Jerry Springer show.

It's also ironic that Trump really did spawn hatred; I now hate Seth Myers; but mostly because he just isn't funny; with his jokes that the the punchline is" Is this guy an idiot or what?!" which I suppose causes the applause sign in the studio to go bonkers... 

But this isn't my format; I need to save this energy to put into the music video...